Piet Mondrian – 'Abstract Painting as We Know It' | TateShots

Dutch painter Piet Mondrian is recognised as one of the most important contributors to the development of abstraction.

\'Piet Mondrian is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century,\' says curator Michael White. \'He developed the language of abstract painting as we know it today. It didn’t really exist before his practice.\'

\'Most people thought this was of the end of painting\', says White.\' We think about these paintings now as the beginning.\'

\'It’s a really interesting question he’s posing himself\', White continues. \'Can you use colour just as itself and not to stand for anything else? If you made yellow into a circle immediately people start making associations with the sun or something like that.\'

For the 70th anniversay of the artist\'s death, Tate Liverpool staged an exhibition Mondrian and his Studios, including an immersive life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio.

\'A lot of people think about Mondrian’s paintings as just flat and graphic. However, here you start to see them as creating very dynamic spatial relationships. He’s thinking about his studio as a type of abstract space that he might be creating through painting.\'

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